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Sunday, June 17, 2007

"The Photograph" was the first poem I ever explicated in a poetry course. I still have all my notes on it. What I love about this poem is its slow, dark quality. Voigt is known for her musicality, partially because she's trained as a pianist and mostly because of her poems. This blog's title comes from this poem, and the black background for the site. This having been my first REALLY thoroughly read and taken-apart poem is probably to blame for my obsession with dark hair in my poems. On the other hand, I once told my favorite poetry teacher that I prefer darkness to daylight (true), and her immediate reduction was, "Of course. It's easier to hide in." Nice.

Black as a crow’s wing was what they saidabout my mother’s hair. Even now,back home, someone on the streetwill stop me to recall my mother, how beautiful she was,first among her sisters.In the photograph, her hairis a spill of ink below the white beret,a swell of dark water. And her eyes as dark,her chin lifted, that brusque defining postureshe had just begun in her defense.Seventeen, on her own,still a shadow in my father’s longing—nothingthe camera could record foretoldher restlessness, the years of shrillunspecified despair, the clear reproachof my life, just beginning.

The horseshoe hung in the neck of the tree sinksdeeper into heartwood every season.Sometimes I hear the pasthum in my ear, its cruel perfected music,as I turn from the stoveor stop to braid my daughter’s thick black hair.

I’ve pulled the last of the year’s young onions.The garden is bare now. The ground is cold,brown and old. What is left of the day flamesin the maples at the corner of myeye. I turn, a cardinal vanishes.By the cellar door, I wash the onions,then drink from the icy metal spigot.

Once, years back, I walked beside my fatheramong the windfall pears. I can’t recallour words. We may have strolled in silence. ButI still see him bend that way—left hand bracedon knee, creaky—to lift and hold to myeye a rotten pear. In it, a hornetspun crazily, glazed in slow, glistening juice.

It was my father I saw this morningwaving to me from the trees. I almostcalled to him, until I came close enoughto see the shovel, leaning where I hadfelt it, in the flickering, deep green shade.

White rice steaming, almost done. Sweet green peasfried in onions. Shrimp braised in sesameoil and garlic. And my own loneliness.What more could I, a young man, want.